As I begin writing on this website, I am 6645 words into my Master’s dissertation in creative writing. I am sitting slap bang in the middle of storm Ciara, a phenomenon that has flooded near enough every street leading anywhere worth going, has caused businesses to close and friends to be evacuated from their homes by boat. It is a tumultuous time, and may seem a strange one to start a website about something as trivial as poetry. I try as hard as I can every day to justify my contribution to the world, it’s just poetry. Poetry doesn’t matter. Its not like I’m performing brain surgery on sick children, or nursing the elderly, or saving cows from unscrupulous dairy farms.
However, these are all thoughts I have when I am in a good place, when nothing bad is happening. When I am faced with adversity, when I am scared, when everything just feels overwhelmingly bad, I go straight to poetry, art, film, music. Where would I be if everyone stopped making art because it felt frivolous, a waste of time? Where would I be if there was nothing but the disasters and depression and medication? Dead, I reckon. In these darkest of moments, I realise what I have always known deep down- that art, poetry and music, are vital for human existence.
All my love,
Rosie Wood
